Unity 3D

Unity usherred in the age of the hobbyist developer. While this field was more or less restricted to programmers in the past, this opened up possibilties for all shakes of developers at a low price point. While I've never been particularly fond of the framework, I don't think anybody in the indie space could avoid it in one incarnation or the other.

My first encounter with it as in the development of Mechwarrior: Tactical Command. This was the default choice for a fledgling company trying to get its first big title out there. Unfortunately, at the time source control was a major issue, the projects took a long time to load, and on iOS, the performance was insufficient their ambitious scope.

I did give it a fair swing with the development of Garage Studio, a dancing simulator for the web. By this time, the product was fairly mature and the tools quite full-fledged. Unfortunately, like most indie hopefuls, the clarity of vision was not quite there, and the project eventually succumbed to the scope creep monster.

Much later, under the auspices of Rush Studios, which was contracted by Frima Studios to do a project for Ubisoft, I did some polishing and bug fixing for Battleship for the XBoxOne. The chain of command was long, but we did push it through to publication.

Finally, as a side-gig, I was contracted by Climax Studios in Auckland to write a video codec Unity plugin for their VR rollercoaster simulator that was to be run on Android.